Triton And The Moons Of Neptune

There are fourteen known moons of
Neptune. They are cold, dark and very hard to see. In fact only one
was seen directly from Earth via telescope.

Triton, the largest satellite was
discovered by William Lassell in 1846. Lassell made his find just 17
days after Neptune itself was discovered.

The next to be discovered is actually
the third in size and it's the moon Nereid.

Nereid was found by Gerald Kuiper by
studying pictures of Neptune in 1949.

The next six, including the second
largest Proteus, were discovered by the Voyager 2 satellite in 1989.

In 2002 the next four was found using
telescope images. These moons are so faint and far away from Neptune
that Voyager missed them. They are about 25th magnitude.
The main telescopes used to find these moons are 4.0 and 3.6 meters
across. That's about 13ft and just under 12ft respectively.

Psamathe was discovered in 2003 by a
team using the 27ft (8.2meter) Subaru telescope in Japan.

A 14th moon has been
discovered in 2013.

TRITON

Triton is the largest of the moons of Neptune,
and the only one you might see from the backyard.

With an apparent magnitude of 13.5,
Triton could be visible from very dark skies and perfect seeing
conditions in a 10in(250mm) telescope like this one.

Triton is the only large, major satellite in the Solar System with a retrograde orbit. This means that it orbits Neptune in the opposite direction as Neptune orbits the Sun. Many irregular moons of the other large planets do this as well but they are fairly small and oddly shaped.